TD Partners With Moven For Mobile Money Management

Toronto Dominion Bank in Canada has announced a partnership with Moven, a mobile-phone based banking and budgeting app that lets users track their payments and see by category how they are spending. The agreement gives TD exclusive Canadian distribution rights to Moven and will let users monitor their TD banking activities from their phones.

The agreement will provide TD with an attractive, and functional, mobile phone app and Moven with the potential to greatly expand its customer base.

"The TD agreement with Moven offers our Canadian customers access to leading-edge technology with a simple, convenient and innovative way to manage day-to-day financial choices alongside long and short-term financial goals," said Rizwan Khalfan, chief digital officer at TD Bank Group. "The addition of real-time money management capabilities to the TD mobile app demonstrates our commitment to comfort and convenience and to our growing leadership in the digital banking space. Customers will be better informed on how they use their money and empowered to improve their financial wellness with each spending decision they make."

Founded by Brett King in 2011, Moven provides real-time updates from a debit card. King said he was surprised to learn from Moven that his spending on taxis was several times higher than he had estimated.

Jacob Jegher, a banking analyst at Celent, was cautiously optimistic about the alliance, writing that the announcement doesn’t make clear whether the banks will use Moven to add personal financial management (PFM) or build a digital offering around Moven. Noting that Canadian banks are very conservative, he lauded the Moven agreement as an effort to do something new, and added that TD’s existing mobile app is fairly awful.

“Overall, I think this is a great announcement. I love the fact that TD is going to try something new here, and attempt to shake up the market a bit.”

Celent will publish a report on PFM in 2015, he added.

“The report will encourage banks to take a completely different approach to PFM – stay tuned for our insights on this topic.”

For Moven, the upside of the TD agreement is considerable, especially when added to New Zealand’s Westpac which has also signed up with Moven. Alex Sion, president of Moven, said the two banks will provide a customer distribution platform of more than 5 million. He initially dodged a question about how many customers Moven has now in the U.S., then eventually said it was 250,000. That would suggest some extremely rapid growth; in July, King told a West Coast conference the service had around 10,000 users with a waiting list of 200,000 to 300,000.

Sion said that mobile banking, unlike online banking, will be disruptive.

Mobile and social will change the way people interact with banks and will affect distribution, pricing, value propositions and how they deliver, he said.

Moven provides an experience — helping customers feels good about their money behaviors — that is distinct from everyday banking. In both New Zealand and Canada we can “help consumers make smart spending decisions and let banks stick to what they do — make transactions, move money around and manage risk.”

Sion said that at Moven will run parallel to the banking apps, like Facebook and Messenger.

“We have developed an app that needs to be distributed globally on top of a banking platform We are going to market and choosing one bank that aligns with us on multiple levels, and we can join to make the banking experience better for everyone.”